My year in media

[lucymonster]

It's been a weird one. I didn't realise how weird and disjointed my media consumption habits were this year until I sat down to summarise them. Not much new stuff overall - I mean, why go to the effort of consuming new media when instead you can just lie stomach-down on the living room floor watching your rats box each other? - but I did at least collect enough new things across the year to fill a post. So here we go.


TV and movies
A star war here, a star war there. I inhaled all of Rebels in the early part of the year and loved it; I watched The Mandalorian and loved that, too. I tried and failed to get interested in TCW but kept bouncing off it until I gave up. I ... uh, may have rewatched the sequels a time or two. 

I watched Star Trek: Discovery and felt very fannish about the first two seasons, though season 3 has so far failed to grab me. My little brother came over at one point and we watched Hacksaw Ridge together, which was so intense I would've probably had to stop watching without his bone-dry army boy commentary to tide me through the violent bits. I did nope out of Mr Robot and Killing Eve, despite loving what I saw of both - my threshold for darkness in live action is low at the best of times, and this year has not been the best of times. Hopefully in the new year I can come back to them.

I binge-watched a LOT of Great British Bake Off and both seasons of Lego Masters Australia. They were more my speed in terms of emotional cope levels, lol. 


Books
The same thing we read every year, Pinky: war nonfiction, with the occasional Terry Pratchett novel as a palate cleanser. I read some Star Wars bits and pieces - Bloodline, the Poe Dameron comics, the Rise of Skywalker novelisation (that counts, right?) - and am partway through Aftermath, which I'm enjoying less than the others but still enough that I'll probably read all three. I also reread the Imperial Radch trilogy with as much relish as last time, but I stalled out on Provenance. It just didn't grip me the way Breq's POV did. I didn't hate it, though, so at some point I'll hopefully go back and finish. 

Not gonna lie, I lost a lot of valuable reading time to the doom scroll. I DID read a ton of great fic, but that's probably a separate post. 


Music
I haven't listened to much new music, which is rare - I have to be dragged by my hair to watch new movies, but I'm always trying new music. It's just that I usually do most of the listening on my commute, and ... well, 2020 happened. I started the year on a black metal kick, but it just got too fucking dark. I've kept a bit of it on playlist rotation - some Gorgoroth, some Rotting Christ - but only select songs, because my serotonin is way too low to handle a whole album at a time. For similar reasons I had to stop listening to Cattle Decapitation, who were my favourite new-to-me find of last year, because their politics may be better but fuck damn do I not need to be reminded that humans are ruining the planet.

Instead I've been listening to a bunch of classic melodeath: At the Gates, In Flames, Dark Tranquillity. Bad Wolves's cover of Zombie got onto my 'take a walk daydreaming about what Kylo Ren might do in my next fic' playlist and stayed there, as did a bunch of very catchy metalcore - we've got Trivium, Atreyu, BfMV, all the good whiny shit. On a related but non-metal front, My Chemical Romance's 2020 reunion tour (lol, that went well) sent me on an emo nostalgia bender. My brother got me listening to Starset, my husband's best mate got me listening to Eskimo Callboy, and my ridiculous crush on Jisoo from BlackPink got me listening to a stream of identical overproduced Kpop that autoplays on YouTube when I'm done rocking out to Boombayah.


Video games
I ... I've been replaying Skyrim. Again. That's pretty much it.

Actually, no it's not: my husband bought an Oculus Quest as a lockdown treat, so I've been playing a ton of Beat Saber and Pistol Whip as well. I don't know if that counts as gaming but it definitely counts as fun.

Comments

[lucymonster]

It really has been a good year for it. I'm a decent cook in a very slapdash, by-eye kind of way that precludes all by the simplest baking, but they make it look so fun and accessible that I got inspired to start making my own bread and pizza bases. I still slightly resent having to weigh my ingredients, but it's worth it for how much better pizza night is now.

Re. recs, most of my reading this year has been Vietnam or later, so probably won't interest you much. I would recommend Odysseus in America, which I finally got around to reading this year after loving Achilles in Vietnam several years ago. It's more psychology that war history, so you might find some use for it - but yeah, it's still Vietnam.

I've read ridiculously little about WWI. Has your dive yielded any pearls?

[osprey_archer]

There's a sequel to Achilles in Vietnam? How did I not KNOW there was a sequel to Achilles in Vietnam, good God. (I feel that I really should be interested in Vietnam, but I find it so depressing, even though really there's no reason why it should be more depressing than, say, World War I. Maybe it's just because it's more recent.)

The book that really started my dive was Emily Mayhew's Wounded: A New History of the Western Front in World War I, which is mostly about the medical personnel during the war - stretcher-bearers, Regimental Medical Officers, orderlies, ambulance drivers, chaplains, etc. It's so well-written and immersive, and I was just so taken with the heroism of the front line medical workers, particularly the stretcher-bearers, who were often under fire as they searched for the wounded in no-man's-land.

Also, in the footnotes Mayhew includes lists of poems and paintings related to the topic, which are SO useful.

[lucymonster]

I definitely found the sequel more depressing than the average war book, mainly I think because it deals with the long, exhausting tail of trauma when the fighting ends. It's a brilliant book but it's not exactly light Christmas reading.

How much gore is there in Wounded? It sounds incredibly up my alley, but medical books are always a game of roulette with my squicks.

[osprey_archer]

There are chapters that focus specifically on the experience of the wounded soldiers, but there's not a lot of detail about the goriness of their wounds - it's more about the emotional experience and the details of getting from the battlefield to a place of treatment.